One of the challenges of having kids and computers together at home is trying to keep the kids from viewing the wrong kind of content. Sure… there’s rules you need to set and all that, but unfortunately, the Internet not only doesn’t know your own rules at home, but wouldn’t respect them if it did.

There’s a couple of options to pursue here:

1. Build a server, load Squid, Privoxy, or another proxy system, and add a content filtering control like DansGuardian. You need to sharpen your geek-skilz to get this done but it also offers the highest level of performance, flexibility, and scalability.

2. Use a host-based content filtering system like something built into Norton Internet Security (no link because they suck!). As your kids get smarter, they’ll figure out a way around this. My 8-year-old did. Plus this is the least efficient way to apply this kind of control, because you have to duplicate your effort on every computer you want to apply the control on. Also, the control usually drives the performance of your Internet connection on that host into the ground.

3. Use a content filtering system built into hardware. Something like SecureSpot from D-Link. These offer a high-level of flexibility, security, and scalability. I use this solution at home, but it can be viewed as expensive. My initial investment was about $80.00, and the yearly subscription is about the same as well.

Recently, I found another way, and assuming you don’t mind someone tracking everything you’re looking up (I do, but the average person doesn’t for some reason) it is a pretty good way to deliver effective content control on the cheap. OpenDNS offers category-based content-filtering and it’s very easy to set up. Here are the steps you need to take to get set-up:

1. Navigate your browser to http://www.opendns.com and click on the “Start using it now” link on the front page.

2. Follow the instructions on setting up your router so that it hands out the correct IP addresses for DNS servers when you connect your computer to your router. This the important part. Make sure you test by putting in a bogus URL into your browser. You should get an OpenDNS search page back if you’re using the right DNS servers.

3. Create an account. It’s free to do and use.

4. Once you’re signed-in, get on the dashboard and set up your content filtering. Add a network, which in your case, is probably the IP address of your connection, which is displayed on the top of the dashboard. You might want to download the dynamic updater, which runs on Windows or Mac. I don’t use it as my IP doesn’t change very often but if you want to do this, you need to turn on the dynamic updater in the advanced settings page as well.

5. Next, go to settings and create a profile with the categories you want to block. There’s some pretty obvious ones and there’s a whitelist/blacklist feature as well. You can also customize your default pages for when things are blocked to let the person who gets the page know why they landed there. I put a nice logo that gets displayed along with some messages for the kids.

So a couple kewl things about this whole setup are; there’s a category for phishtank and another category for malware. I don’t know who’s feed they use for malware site blocking, but the Phishtank is community-based and I like that approach.